Instead of dropping the puck, the National Hockey League and the union that represents its players have dropped the ball.

A last-minute bid to end the owners’ 154-day lockout failed Wednesday, and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman announced the cancellation of the 2004-05 season.

In the end, the players would not go below their offer of a $49 million salary cap, and the owners never offered to increase their cap figure above $42.5 million.

Bettman called it a “sad, regrettable day.”

Bob Goodenow, head of the NHL Players’ Association, called the cancellation “unthinkable,” but also said, “Unfortunately we never had a real negotiating partner. … The players never asked for more money, they just asked for a marketplace to exist where they could negotiate with their clubs’ owners for what their value was to their teams.”

San Jose Sharks president Greg Jamison expressed strong support for Bettman’s decision.

“We are committed to getting a new collective bargaining agreement that makes financial sense, because we have no other alternative,” said Jamison, adding that the Sharks lost more than $6 million last season despite reaching the Western Conference finals.

As a result of the cancellation, the NHL has become the first major professional sports league in North America to lose an entire season because of a labor dispute. The Stanley Cupwill not be awarded for the first time since 1919, when play was shelved by a worldwide flu epidemic that killed at least 20 million people.

No one can say when NHL hockey will return, or in what form. Will the players attempt to form a rival league? Will the owners return in October with replacement players from lesser leagues? Might the NHL return with far fewer than the current 30 teams?

There also is the prospect of competition to the NHL from the rebirth of the long-defunct World Hockey Association. And who knows how many Europeans who have been playing overseas during the lockout might choose not to return?

Had the lockout been settled Wednesday, the NHL had planned to play a 28-game schedule followed by a complete four rounds of playoffs.

Bettman hinted Wednesday the league would have immediately instituted some rules changes to increase the NHL’s entertainment value, which has lagged in recent years. It is presumed one of those changes would have involved using shootouts to resolve ties.

Instead of breaking ties on the ice, though, the NHL and its players will have to continue to find a way to break their bargaining deadlock. But in the aftermath of Bettman’s cancellation Wednesday, the NHL and the union withdrew all the concessions made in recent days that had seemed to point toward an 11th-hour settlement.

If the league and the NHLPA cannot find a solution in the coming months, Bettman did not rule out returning next season with replacement players. Jamison said, “It’s premature to discuss that. The league has not made any suggestion that that is the direction the league is going.”

The best news for Sharks season ticketholders is that they can expect to receive refunds in the next few weeks. But this would have been a season of high expectations for the Sharks, who might have been the best positioned of the league’s 30 clubs to move forward had the lockout ended Wednesday.

The Sharks were the only team with all of its players under contract for the 2004-05 season, and according to the NHLPA, their payroll would have been less than $31 million.

By contrast, according to the NHLPA, Toronto’s league-high payroll would have been nearly twice that of the Sharks’, and five Maple Leafs remained unsigned.

“We were ready to go,” Jamison said. “It’s very disappointing. We worked hard to get to this point. But we’re part of a league.”

Roughly two-thirds of the NHL’s teams already would have been below the owners’ $42.5 million cap figure had the season gone forward. And that wouldn’t have taken into account a 24 percent across-the-board salary rollback offered two months ago by the players that would have been part of the new CBA.

Bettman and the owners have insisted that a strict salary cap is needed to maintain competitive balance. But in the past three seasons, 12 different teams reached the playoff semifinals. And last year, three of the four semifinalists — the Sharks, Calgary and Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay — were teams on the low end of the payroll rankings.

The owners also have said that the NHL has lost roughly $500 million the last two seasons despite revenues of close to $4 billion. Player salaries have skyrocketed over the past decade and reached an average of roughly $1.8 million in a league that brings in virtually no money from its network television contract.

“At the end of the day, there is no question the revenues we have and the expenses we have call for some sort of cap,” Jamison said. “It’s meaningful that (the NHLPA) put a cap on the table. It just wasn’t enough.”